by Judith Tarr
“There are demons everywhere,” said the priest, “except in Su-Shaklan. Our prayers keep them out.”
Their Great Wards kept them out, Vanyi thought. She did not say it. “Still, in Asanion, men look as these men do, as the lady does who rode with us, though she’s taller than any of them. Their faces are like hers. They veil them for honor and for custom.”
The priest shuddered delicately. “Ah, poor things, to be so ugly. Maybe they do descend from demons, though they deny it. Demons are very strong.”
“Daruya is reckoned beautiful in our country,” Vanyi said with a hint of sharpness, catching herself a moment too late, suppressing rueful laughter. She was as vain as that girlchild, and on her behalf, too.
“Ah,” said the priest, mildly nonplussed. “You are strange.”
“But human,” said Vanyi, “and desirous of addressing the queen. Might the Minister of Protocol be persuaded to grant me a few moments of his time?”
“This mere mortal could hardly say, lady,” said the priest.
“Venture a guess,” Vanyi said with a flash of teeth.
The priest blinked. “Oh, that is beyond me, lady. It has been a great pleasure to speak with you. May I return, if your charity permits? I should like very much to hear more of this empire of yours, where demons call themselves men, and kings walk in the dust without fear of soiling their feet.”
Vanyi inclined her head. She could keep him there if she tried, but she was not minded to do that. He would go back to his Minister of Protocol, she was sure, and report every word that they had said. Then, with any luck at all, the Minister himself would be curious enough to summon her—or to send a messenger with a better head for the heights.
She could wait. For a while. Then, with or without the mighty Minister, she would do as she had meant to do since she conceived this expedition.
13
Daruya was bored.
Everyone else had things to do. Vanyi was pressing for an audience with the queen. The mages had raised their wards and begun a working to discover what had broken the Gates. The Olenyai took turns on guard. Even Kimeri had occupation in plenty, what with the garden, the stable, and the discovery that Kadin the mage had no objection to the presence of a small girlchild as he went about his business with the animals.
Daruya was the odd one, the one who had no duty and no occupation. Vanyi did not need her to assist in the campaign for an audience with the queen—if anything she was a hindrance, what with the need to explain who she was and what she was and why she had come, and the delicacy of balancing her rank as princess-heir with the queen’s rank as ruler of Shurakan. Kimeri needed her only to be there and to offer praise of the flowers she brought in great untidy armfuls, or the spotted cat-kit she retrieved from the straw of the dun mare’s stall, or the bit of harness she had mended all by herself.
The mages certainly did not need her; she had proved already, too often, that she overwhelmed their subtle workings with her great blaze of power. And when she went into the city, to the house where the Gate had been, to see what was there, she found Kadin in the empty echoing place with no need or want of her, and a shrinking from the light of her power that made her blind angry and inexplicably inclined to weep. She had nothing to do and no purpose here but to wait, and to hope that when Vanyi won through at last to the queen, Daruya would be permitted to speak in the emperor’s name.
There was only so much she could do to occupy herself in the house they had been given. The servants needed no assistance, and looked askance at any offer of it. Kadin was not displeased to let her help with the seneldi, but she could not spend every moment of every day in their company. The Olenyai neither needed nor wanted her to take a turn on guard.
For a full hand of days she kept her patience reined in. She wandered about the palace, finding no obstacle to passage, merely polite stares and respectful bows. People spoke when spoken to. Some even addressed her before she addressed them, greeting her, inquiring as to her health and the health of her companions.
They all seemed to know a great deal about the embassy, even to understand that it was an embassy and not an invasion of demons from beyond the Worldwall. It was not a matter of importance, they indicated with glance and gesture and inclination of the head, but it was pleasant to see strangers here where strangers came so seldom.
“You’ll take back the tale of us, I’m sure,” said one exquisite courtier in a coat that trailed behind him, from beneath what had at first seemed a towering helmet but revealed itself to be an edifice built of his long lacquered hair. “Your empire would wish to know how we order the world in Su-Shaklan.”
“It is curious, yes,” Daruya replied with careful courtesy. “It’s always eager to learn the ways of strangers.”
“It will learn much from ours,” said the courtier. “Why, it might even become civilized, and your emperor be judged worthy to address our children of heaven.”
Daruya stared at him. It dawned on her with the slowness of incredulity that he was calling her a barbarian and her emperor an inferior monarch, unfit to stand in the presence of Shurakan’s divine rulers. Her first impulse was to laugh; her second, to box this idiot’s ears. She suppressed both. “My emperor is the son of a god,” she said stiffly.
“Ah,” said the courtier, polite. “How pleasant. Is it a god we know?”
“We call him the sun,” she said more stiffly still.
“Ah,” the courtier said again with an expression of mounting ennui. “A great god, yes. Very great. But not one of ours.”
They were not interested. That was the maddening thing, the thing that Daruya would never have credited if she had not seen and heard it. This little sipping-bowl of a kingdom fancied itself great; looked on the mighty realm of Sun and Lion, and smiled as at the fancy of a child; called its lords mere barbarians, and disparaged its god with a shrug of sheerest indifference.
How tiny this realm was, how minute the concerns of its people, how very narrow their minds. She would have been happy to open their smug little skulls with an axe.
oOo
The palace was too small for her grand fit of temper. She walked right out of it, with an Olenyas to keep her shadow safe: Yrias, who was young and diffident and too shy to stop her. He would be her protection against Chakan’s wrath when the captain of Olenyai discovered that she had ventured the streets of the Summer City without him.
They were as steep as ever and as narrow, and as straitly walled. It was like walking between cliffs in the mountains, except for the gates that opened here and there, and the people who went back and forth in a jostling crowd. No one rode here, even on an ox; they were all afoot, many laden down with mountainous packs or trotting between the shafts of a wheeled cart in which sat a toplofty noble or a painted-faced lady or a mound of roots and greens for the market.
Common people, she had come to realize, dressed as she did, in trousers and hip-long coat. People of rank wore coats of increasing length, until the princes swept about in elaborate garments that trailed behind them, worn over the same simple shirt and wide-legged trousers as that affected by the lowest urchin—though of cut and color befitting their station. Her good plain clothes, which in Starios would have marked her for what she was, here made her seem a commoner, and not a wealthy one at that.
The distinction was not as sharp as it might have been. She saw a princeling give place to a man in a coat that hung only to his knees, because the latter was larger and older and walking with ponderous dignity. The prince acted as if he were doing the man a favor; the man acted as if he had expected that favor and would have been shocked not to receive it.
Age mattered, she had already observed. Size did, too, it seemed. And dignity. But a prince was still a prince. The queen and the king still were thought of as equal to the gods. Everyone bowed to divinity and yielded place to it, but when priests walked past, unless they marched in procession, they had no more precedence than anyone else. It all seemed very complicated and very hard
to make sense of.
There were temples everywhere. Asanion’s thousand gods seemed to be mirrored here in Shurakan, if not doubled and trebled. Every god had his priesthood, too, and every family gave at least one child to a temple.
She saw a gaggle of such children in the care of an erect, stern woman, being herded toward a sweetseller’s stall. They were reciting as they ran, in eerie unison: “The gods are all. The gods are one. We are all one in the eyes of the gods.”
Priests all wore the same robe, although its color might change with the god and the temple. Children of princes stood equal there to children of beggars. She stopped to ask the woman who herded the children, waiting till each had been given its fistful of sweetness and squatted in a line to eat it, perched like birds on the low wall that ran from the sweetseller’s stall to that of a maker of shoes.
“You are all one?” Daruya asked. “Truly?”
The priestess stared at her, curious but not hostile, and unafraid of her yellow eyes. “All of us,” she said, “yes. Hush now, Kai-Kai, you know you like the redspice buns better than the honeytits.”
The child sulked but ate her bun, reminding Daruya forcibly of Kimeri in a similar fit of indecision. Daruya smiled at her. She would not smile back, though she stared as hard as the priestess had. “So everyone is the same in the gods’ eyes. And yet you have divisions; you have princes and you have beggars.”
“Of course,” said the priestess. “That’s how the gods ordered the world. But we’re all the same in the end. We all die.”
“Even your children of heaven?”
The priestess’ lips thinned. “You are a foreigner. You don’t understand.”
“But I would like to.”
“No,” said the priestess. “You only think so.” She gathered her charges together abruptly and swept them onward, most still eating, and all sticky-fingered.
Daruya stayed where she was. She had meant to discomfit the priestess, there was no denying it, but she had not intended to feel guilty about it. It was time these smug self-satisfied fools had a comeuppance.
On the other side of the street, between a goldsmith and the extravagantly gilded gate of a temple, was a place that looked interesting. Its gate opened on a courtyard, which was a garden as they often were here. Low tables were set in and about the garden, so low that they had no need of chairs, and people sat at them on silken rugs, sipping from little cups or nibbling what looked like rarefied examples of the sweetseller’s wares. Nearly all of the people were men, and few of them were priests. The coats that she could see trailed in long sweeps on the clipped grass or the patterned stones of pavement.
This, she saw as she drew closer, was a teahouse—tea being what people drank here when they did not drink gaggingly sweet wine or, even worse, the milk of oxen. It was a poor excuse for a quencher of thirst, being but hot water poured over a handful of mildly bitter herbs, but they made a great fuss over it, with ceremonies devoted to it, and whole houses that served nothing but tea and sweet cakes.
In Starios this would have been a tavern frequented by the lordly sort. Daruya had spent many an evening in such a place, drinking and gaming and seeing what trouble she could get into without incurring her grandfather’s wrath. It was to the upper room of one that she had taken a certain gold-and-ivory beauty of a lordling, and conceived an heir without the complication of a husband.
Shurakani teahouses were quieter places, from the look of this one. Her arrival caused a mild flutter—very mild.
She was not asked to leave. When she sat at a table, a soft-footed servant glided up, deposited on the table a delicate night-blue pot and an even more delicate gilt-rimmed cup, and glided away.
The pot was almost too hot to touch. The cup was cool, no larger or more substantial than an eggshell. The scent that wound with steam from the spigot of the pot was as delicate as the rest, with a suggestion of flowers.
She thought of calling for ale, and raising a tumult until she got it. But she was too well trained to do that.
Pity. She was bored, and growing more bored by the heartbeat. She poured tea into the cup, found it an exquisite shade of golden amber. Its flavor was subtly bitter and subtly sweet. It was like the tea of ceremony, somewhat, but darker, stronger: more fit for use.
Conversations that had paused with her presence had resumed. They were not all as quiet as she might have expected, considering the elegance of the teahouse and its servitors. One table crowded with young elegants was discussing in detail the wares of a certain house of pleasure on a street called the Path of the White Blossoms. At another, three or four grey-mustached men discoursed lengthily on the nature, number, and kind of the gods.
“Incalculable, innumerable, and ineffable,” said a man who sat alone near Daruya. He had been watching her for a while; she had been undertaking to ignore him. That was rather difficult, as it happened. He was not as young as the young elegants, not nearly as old as the grey philosophers. His hair was black with ruddy lights, worn in a club at his nape. His mustaches hung just below the line of his shaven jaw. His shoulders were broad beneath his coat, which was long enough to gather in folds on either side of him as he sat cross-legged on the grass. She thought he might be tall: he sat eye to eye with her, and she sat higher than most of the men round about.
He met her stare with one as frank, and grinned at her frown. “What, stranger, do I offend you? Don’t people take one another’s measure in your country?”
“How do you know what country I come from?” she demanded.
He laughed and gestured in a graceful sweep: her hair that escaped all bonds she set on it, her eyes, her face, her height that was rather extraordinary here. He had long hands, she noticed, and tapering fingers; but they were not either weak or effeminate. They looked, in fact, quite strong.
“You would be one of the people from beyond the Wall,” he said. “The demon’s daughter, I’d suppose—and is that one of your husbands behind you?”
Yrias’ indignation was so sharp that Daruya started. It was on her behalf, of course—it always was.
She wanted to slap him. Instead she said to the man who spoke so boldly, “None of them is my husband. They’re my guards. And I am not a demon’s get!”
“Oh, surely,” said the man with no evidence of contrition. “You are human, yes, the priests say that you say so. Pardon me for needing to confirm it.”
“I suppose,” she said with acid precision, “that it’s only to be expected. You know no race but your own.”
“What, there are others?”
He was laughing at her. People who laughed at Daruya never escaped unscathed. Yet, because he was an innocent in such matters, she said sweetly enough, “Ah, but you people have never seen any faces but your own. I have kin who look like you. And kin who look like my warriors, or like me. And kin who are taller than I, and black from head to foot. All bow to the Lord of Sun and Lion, who rules from the city in which I was born.”
“Truly?” The man swept up his pot of tea and his cup and a basket fragrant of sweetness and spices, and established himself boldly and shamelessly at her table, facing her across it, favoring her with what no doubt he reckoned an enchanting smile. “Tell me more of all these people who sound like men and demons and dark gods all mixed in together.”
“They’re all men,” Daruya said, snappish. “And you are presumptuous. Did I invite you to share my table?”
“You answer when I ask questions,” the man said as if that countered her objection. He dipped cooled tea from her cup into the roots of a blossoming tree and filled it again, and held it out to her till she had perforce to take it. He smiled as she sipped, transparently approving. “My name is Bundur of House Janabundur.”
She raised her brows. Was she supposed to be awed? “My name,” she said, “is Daruya of House Avaryan.”
His brows rose in echo of hers. “That is a proud house?”
“That is the royal house,” she said. “Is yours?”
He
shrugged, nonchalant. “I’m not the king, and not likely to be, for which I praise the gods. Are you likely to be queen?”
“If I outlive my grandfather,” she said, “yes.”
“And he let you come here. That was generous of him.”
She felt the slow flush climb her cheeks. He saw it—she traced it in the gleam of his eyes. Narrow black eyes above proud cheekbones.
He did look remarkably like a plainsman. A very handsome, very presumptuous plainsman. Sharply, angrily, she said, “I am my grandfather’s envoy.”
“You, and not the woman who is said to lead your embassy?”
Oh, he was a clever man, and he knew it, too. “Vanyi leads. I speak for the emperor when the time comes.”
“Emperor,” he said, musing, downing a cup of his own tea and a cake from the basket as he did it. “That is a king, yes? But more than a king?”
“A king of kings.”
“How can there be more than one king?”
“In the same way that there can be more than one god. Kings are common in the world. Emperors are rarer. There were two, for a while. Now there is one.”
“One killed the other?”
“One died. His son married the daughter of the other. Their son was emperor. And so it continued.”
“Ah,” said Bundur. “An emperor is only a king after all.”
“He is not,” Daruya said. “Kings bow to him. He rules kings. Your whole kingdom would fit into a minor barony, with room left to graze whole herds of oxen.”
“Our kingdom is the heart of the world,” said Bundur, “its model and its pattern. Your emperor should have let his sister rule also, as the gods decreed.”
“Our emperors have no sisters. Or brothers. The god gives each royal descendant one child, and one child only. That child rules.”
Bundur tossed his head. “No! You don’t say it? What did your first king do to offend the gods?”
“Rather a great deal,” said Daruya with sudden wryness. “But that was supposed to be a gift.”